Steinbeck (42 page)

In the morning I awaken to see the sun on my little garden and a flood of joy comes over me—such a thing I have not felt for many years. My material for the Zapata script is all collected now and next Monday I will go to work on it with great energy, for I have great energy again. Whether there is any talent left I do not know nor care very much. But the churning joy in the guts that to me is the physical symptom of creation is there again.

I shall not be to see you this winter. This divorce has left me 30,000 dollars short in my tax money and I must work. I still have Gwyn and the children to support. I don't care about her but I want the children well cared for. At first I wanted to kill some one or be killed, even to the extent of walking alone at night in Mexico with a bare machete in my hand but the challenge did not work. I was avoided like the mad dog I guess I was. And that is all over now and a soft benevolence is on me. And that is all of that now of me.

I did not know that the glass path was still under your feet. I thought that was all over. It is not fine to see two people determined to destroy each other. What guilt do you two carry and why can't you confess it in the dark and unload the torture and the hatred, because you do hate each other. A priest or a psychiatrist might do it if you cannot whisper your true grief into the ground. Or maybe you have learned to love pain. This is far from unusual. Pain is exciting whether with whips or with little sharp pointed thoughts barbed and poisoned. I have forgotten what it is like to love a woman. It is very strange. It is like forgetting pain or hunger. Desire I have in great and all-directional abundance, even a fine goat-like lust—but love—the softening—the compassionate thing I don't have now. I think it will come back and surely I will welcome it back. I suspect that some internal healing is going on. I would hate to be closed up and withdrawn—even unconsciously.

I do not think now I will remarry. I think I am not good at it. I want more children but it doesn't seem necessary to marry to have them. Two women were turned to hatred and pain by marriage with me. And both of them would probably have been happy mistresses.

I have so much work to do. As soon as my Zapata script is finished I shall get to the large book of my life—The Salinas Valley. I don't care how long it takes. It will be nearly three quarters of a million words or about twice as long as the Grapes of Wrath. And after that I have five plays to write. And after that I should like to do one more film—the life of Christ from the four Gospels—adding and subtracting nothing. But that is for the future—maybe six years. I am so glad your windows progress and are satisfying. And I will be glad to get into my big train of a book. My blood bubbles when I think of that and I get a feeling like silent weeping. All the passion that has been drained off into neurotic and jealous women is now back and whole and ready to use for what it was conditioned to be.

My little garden, like yours, is a thing to go out to look at every morning. Some new god damned little leaf is there or a flower is curling. And the great war against snails and varmints, which are only less destructive and poisonous than us, goes on ceaselessly, I kill them and stomp on them—an enemy—and I admire them quite a lot too because they can't poison or stomp me and yet they keep ahead of me. These things I can love. And I think I could love a European woman or a negress or a Chinese but the breed of American woman—part man, part politician—they have the minds of whores and the vaginas of Presbyterians. They are trained by their mothers in a contempt for men and so they compete with men and when they don't win, they whimper and go to psychoanalysts. The American girl makes a servant of her husband and then finds him contemptible for being a servant. American married life is the doormat to the whore house. Eventually they will succeed in creating a race of humosexuals. And they will not be content with that. I am just beginning to see our mores objectively and I do not like what I see and I do not want my boys brought up by them. The impulse of the American woman to geld her husband and castrate her sons is very strong. This feeling has been brought home to me by Mexican women who are quite content to be women and who are good at it as opposed to ours who try to be men and aren't good at it at all. Well, I guess I wasn't a man or I wouldn't have put up with it. But I am a man now and I don't think I will surrender that nice state. I like it and the others can lump it. I hope this does not sound like bitterness because it is not. It is anything else. So long—Write

John

Pacific Grove
December 3, 1948

My dear Mr. Brooks:

I am extremely sensible of the honor paid me by the Academy in making me a member. Having been blackballed from everything from the Boy Scouts to the United States Army, this election is not only a great experience but for me a unique one. My most profound thanks.

Yours sincerely,
John Steinbeck

[Pacific Grove]
December 28, 1948

Dear Bo:

I had your good cable and thank you for it. I should have gone to spend Christmas with you but I am too broke. Christmas eve was a lonely bad time. It won't ever be that bad again. I feel that I am missing something rich and valuable in the growing of my children. It doesn't really matter, I guess, but I do feel cheated of it. The script I have been working on went to pieces too. Partly because of Christmas and partly, I am convinced, because my eyes need attention. I think I need glasses for writing and reading. Many headaches, nausea and other things could easily be eyestrain.

Funny how I had to wear the hairshirt this year. But I was trying to remember old times. I have talked with Carol on the phone but have not seen her. She sounds the same and all right, but the same.

An odd thing is that sadness does not necessarily become greater with age. I can remember desolating sadnesses when I was a child, worse probably than I have ever had since, because they came out of a black void and there was no reason for them that I could see. Things that were black were black indeed and things that were white were blinding. I do not believe now that the world is going to be destroyed by bombs or ideologies of any kind. The world has always been in process of decay and birth.

I must finish my script and I would like to get a good start on my book. Maybe when that is started I will be able to do it anywhere and maybe Stockholm would be a good place to do some of it. Maybe down on your place in the south with a fine warm blonde about. My love of woman flesh and feel does not diminish. It even grows as I know more about the general and am less blinded by the particular. It was individuals who did the murdering, not the thing woman. I hope the good potters with red hearts had red wine and love this Christmas. And how I wish I could have been with all of you with a big pottery jar of wine and a plate of herring. What a nice thing is herring. I'll finish this tomorrow. I seem to have a guest arriving (see above).

 

Next day—I was right—it was a guest. This morning I made for me a momentous decision. I am going to spend the New Year in Los Angeles. I'll go down tomorrow and come back on the second. It will be a change of pace. I will drink a lot and make love to very pretty women. I don't care if they are not bright. They are very very pretty. And for a while I am going to be content with that. I will get this off now. The post office is going to hate all the stamps. It is more work cancelling them.

So long for now. And a good year for both of us.

Love to you all
John

[Pacific Grove]
January 22 [1949]

Dear Pat:

I have my glasses now and print jumps out of the page at me. I only need them for reading and writing. And speaking of reading—there are some books I need Pat, to fill out my library. You see when I want to know something the local libraries either don't have it or are closed. There is no particular hurry and I don't care whether the books are new or not but I need some volumes in medicine, a Grey's Anatomy, fairly new edition, 2., a Pharmacopaea (can't even spell it). This should be a new one because of the many new drugs. 3., This should be a new one because of the many new drugs. 3., the best standard volume in Toxicology. In this field the encyclopedia is not of much value. My books are supposed to be on the way but of course I don't know what she will let me have. I'll fill in the gap when they arrive, but I won't know until then. Also I will probably bring up most of the books from the lab which will make all in all quite a good reference library. These glasses are wonderful. It is a pleasure to write again and I was getting to dread every day's stint. Maybe I can work again. I hope. I was getting deeply worried thinking my will power was gone.

Here then is a health report. I am only interested because I must be well to work. I am tough and mean after quite a house cleaning. My closets were full of dust, of little feats, of half felt emotions. If I am to be a son of a bitch, I'm going to be my own son of a bitch. I've kicked out the duty emotions. They will snap back of course but decreasingly. I get the despondencies still. But I have learned that if you are not right with a person, nothing can make you right and if you are right then nothing can make you wrong. There is some anger at me here because I no longer have the money to solve my friends' difficulties. I stumbled on a phrase to take care of that situation: it is Fuck it! I have been the soft touch for too long. Still would be if I had it but I haven't. And probably am never going to have again.

Out of some kind of pride or weaknest I have never wanted to accept anything. It gave me some self-indulging feeling to be the giver and not the receiver. It is going to be hard to learn to receive and to accept but I am going to learn. Thus when a girl in Mexico wanted to hustle for me, I wouldn't let her. She would have had some good thing if I had let her walk the streets for me—some kind of fulfilling.

It is a great fine storm in the air, wind and rain and fresh cold. It is my kind of weather and it gives me a good feeling. The rain is lashing the windows like whips and I have a good fire. Later a girl will come in and I still function well in that department. You can't want more than that—a cold night and a warm girl.

My Arabia Deserta was down at the office. I am so glad to have it. I think it is the greatest secular prose in English that I know. Doughty makes the language a great stone with designs of metal and outcroppings of preciousness, emerald and diamond and obsidian. It is good to have here to see what can be done with the language. I do not think it was easy for him to write. No such sense of ease and flow ever came without great and tearing effort.

I have some new snapshots of my children. I think I have located a boat for us to go cruising in. I told them we would sleep and cook our dinner on a boat and that seems to excite them very much Just as it excites me still. What better thing is there than that?

Pat I'm getting the old ecstasies back sometimes. Thinking about a boat made the hair rise on the back of my neck. You say a good piece of writing does that to you, a chacun son gout I guess.

I went out to find little pine trees to plant about my house and they aren't up yet. But some other things are. As soon as the rain stops I will take a shovel out and get some yerba buena and some wild iris for my garden. Yerba buena is a ground crawling mint from which the old ones used to make a curative tea. I remember drinking it when I was little. It is a stomachic and it smells wonderful when you crush it—a sweet but sharp odor that pierces way back of your nose cleanly.

And this is the end. But I think you will agree that this propped up life is—what? I don't know. It still has some savor and what more could I ask of it. Women are still beautiful and desirable and things smell good and sometimes the flame burns jumping the nerve ends like little boys jumping fences.

So—
love
John

[Pacific Grove]
[February 22, 1949]
Washington's Birthday
and nearly mine

Dear Pat:

Here it is again, another year and the first one I haven't dreaded for a long time. I just finished my day's work. It is finally going like mad, or did I tell you that? And now that it is going I don't think it will take long. And as always when I am working I am gay. I'm terribly gay. I'm even gay about what I'm going to tell you. And I want you to keep this to yourself.

I'm asking Gwyn for my books. I asked for the anthologies, poetry, drama, classics etc. which I have collected over the years. Well I didn't get them. I got an absolute minimum. I wish you would please get me, if you can, complete catalogues of Everyman, Random House and the other libraries that do such things because I do want to replace the things I actually need for work. Isn't it odd that having stripped me of everything else, she also retains the tools of the trade from which she is living? A very funny girl and I think she is headed for trbuble—not from me. I did get the dictionary and the encyclopedia and a few others.

I don't know what has happened but the dams are burst. Work is pouring out of me. I guess maybe I am over the illness. Who knows? But at last there seems to be some opening at the end of the street.

Please let me hear from you. And don't tell any one about this book thing. I don't want to fight with Gwyn unless the children are involved and sooner or later I think they will be.